Apocalypse November 2021

Planning to Plan

It’s so simple and stupid it makes it hard to understand. On vaccine and mask requirements contravening freedoms, you forget about the bigger freedom, the duty of individuals to contribute something to the collective. It’s not all about you, a society is not just a load of individuals near each other, that falsehood used to manipulate us and sell us stuff and make us fearful of each other, of others taking something from us. A simple symbol of respect: I don’t know you, but I see you. All the different types of people willing to club together, and then this other category, with this sad bloated fantasy of being important, of having power, of making some big revolutionary stand, now, like this, holding fellow citizens back from getting on with whatever it is they normally do, which is none of your business… that there is the real freedom. Think of how many people die, suffer every day, who aren’t cut out for the pressure society puts us under, who fail every day by society’s standards, or worse, their own. Who’s gonna make it? Who’s gonna be successful? It’s not freedom, it’s a lottery. It’s bullshit, unfair, exploitative, wasteful, unsustainable, and you can’t not play.

Failing Tory systems, practically my whole living memory of UK politics. The government circumvented debate on new anti-protest laws, introducing 18 pages to the Policing Bill after readings in the Commons and Lords. Protesters can be given ASBOs for being out even if they haven’t committed a crime, arrested if they think you may cause a nuisance. Owen Paterson will remain a public servant but outside the cruel world of politics, says the last few days have been intolerable. Indeed. Committing fraud with Randox contracts, voting for corruption, as instructed. Peerages as a little sweetener on the side. Missing minutes. Bah. The Mail turns on Johnson, for a day at least. Looks like his days of usefulness are numbered. Aw look, Alok Sharma’s crying. Flimsy promises. Knaves and fools, they’ve sold their souls, themselves in turn beholden to (bigger, offshore) crooks and puppet masters.

Taking back control of our borders is going well. Manufacturing a migrant crisis, getting people scared, getting them to think the crisis is ours, from our perspective, when that boat capsized and at least 27 people, among them a pregnant woman and three children, died by drowning in the English Channel. A price worth paying for an imagined ideal of freedom? Migrant crossings are now a national emergency (they aren’t). The government must be given emergency powers (it mustn’t). Time to override the Human Rights Act! Think of the potential returns in scapegoats and tabloid frenzy! For all the talk of reducing pull factors attracting people to the UK, by definition, the life they are fleeing, the push factor, will be worse (1). The facts do not support a case for cruelty. The people we’re seeing, who can’t advocate for themselves, they’re the ones who still specifically want to come to England. We should be welcoming them. Fact is we’re not all that popular anymore.

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(1) Lewis Goodall